Agents Vie to Become American Modern’s ‘Most Confident’

An Ohio-based property/casualty insurer experimenting with gamification to educate agents on its specialized products and services is finding that it is learning a lot about its agent force in the process.

American Modern Insurance Group, in the final stages of its “Most Confident Agent” campaign, is discovering not only what agents are knowledgeable about but also what they don’t know in terms of what the Cincinnati area-based company offers consumers. For American Modern marketing executives Tammy Nelson, chief experience officer, and Brent Floyd, director of Creative Services, that information has given them insight into where the company needs to do a better job of educating its agents.

American Modern’s Most Confident Agent campaign began in October and wraps up on Nov. 21, when the results of the strategy will be announced. To encourage participation, the initiative uses videos and quizzes to engage and inform agents, as well as incentives such as cash prizes — including a grand prize of $5,000 — and the chance knock the fictional Most Confident Agent, Mike Noble, off his pedestal and take his place.

Agents are urged to follow Noble on Facebook, to watch the videos and take the tests.

“One of the questions, or the question that is most often answered incorrectly gives us great insight into what we need to do as marketers to help better educate them,” Nelson said.

“It’s pretty cool to see the agents are learning, but we’re learning as well at the same time,” she added.

Nelson and Floyd said while the program is still in progress, it appears to be a success in terms of agent participation.

“With this particular campaign we’ve set levels, points and benchmarks, so that people can reach them and really feel like they’ve accomplished something,” Floyd said.

He said the goal of the current campaign is “to educate our agents about our residential line of products, our specialty line of products. That includes our vacant, seasonal, rental, owner-occupied and even manufactured homes product lines or solutions.” It is built upon a test run that the company conducted with its agents in February. The engagement rate in the test was “huge,” Floyd said.

“In a six-week window, we saw more than 8,000 downloads of product-based PDFs and videos. That window almost exceeded an entire year — the entire 2015 year for downloads. In a six-week window, we were able to engage and deliver almost as much content as we’d delivered in an entire year,” he said.

Nelson added that agents are actively involved in the process. “It’s not just us pushing it into their inbox, but they’re clicking through, and then they are actively seeking out that content.”

While the primary aim of the gamification strategy is to empower agents with information about American Modern’s products and services, a secondary goal is to drive premium growth, Nelson said.

“We know that the more familiar the agent is with our product, the more they know about it, the more likely they are to quote it when that risk comes across their desks,” Floyd added.

“We’d love to drive quotes and premium from those agents as they become more educated, but obviously, it takes time and steps to get to those deeper benefits of the campaign. Definitely, education is first and foremost, and we hope that quotes and premium are driven out of that as well.” Nelson said.